Google Hacks

Being a Good Search Engine Citizen

Five don’ts and one do for getting your site indexed by Google.

A high ranking in Google can mean a great deal of traffic. Because of that, there are lots of people spending lots of time trying to figure out the infallible way to get a high ranking from Google. Add this. Remove that. Get a link from this. Don’t post a link to that.

Submitting your site to Google to be indexed is simple enough. Google’s got a site submission form (http://www.google.com/addurl.html), though they say if your site has at least a few inbound links (other sites that link to you), they should find you that way. In fact, Google encourages URL submitters to get listed on The Open Directory Project (DMOZ, http://www.dmoz.org/) or Yahoo! (http://www.yahoo.com/).

Nobody knows the holy grail secret of high page rank without effort. Google uses a variety of elements, including page popularity, to determine page rank. Page rank is one of the factors determining how high up a page appears in search results. But there are several things you should not be doing combined with one big thing you absolutely should.

Does breaking one of these rules mean that you’re automatically going to be thrown out of Google’s index? No; there are over 2 billion pages in Google’s index at this writing, and it’s unlikely that they’ll find out about your rule-breaking immediately. But there’s a good chance they’ll find out eventually. Is it worth it having your site removed from the most popular search ...